Of samosa and kachori

A visit to Indore, Delhi, Lucknow, Bhopal or Alwar will remain incomplete until you have the delicious samosa and kachori. While relishing them, I’ve always wondered where these came from. Samosa is not of Indian origin; it came from Turkey, where it was originally the Turkey mutton pie. Samosa is an Indian adaptation to suit Indian palates.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Khiljis of Delhi and Lahore used to put minced beef in hard-fried Turkish naan . It used to be big and was a bit difficult for the sub-continental Muslim to digest! Hard-fried Turkish naan stuffed with veal is heavy.

So the sub-continental Muslims began to use minced lamb in place of beef and veal. Vegetarian Hindus replaced minced meat with vegetarian stuff, and samosa came about in the early 16th century (MaCoskar and Griffith:

Frontier Food , 1877, out-of-print. A copy with eight pages missing is at the Khudabakhsh Library in Patna).

But kachori is completely subcontinental in origin. Serendipity gave birth to it. Some food historians say the masala puri later became kachori. However, a kachori’s outer shell is harder than that of a masala puri.

The Bengali polymath Nirad C. Chaudhury mentioned one Shashikant Dhar of Khulna (Bangladesh), who used to make kachori by frying puri and stuffing it with garlic and heeng , asafoetida. That was at the fag end of the 18th century. I came across old texts at Kakul, where Pakistan’s Military Academy is situated and where Osama Bin Laden was killed.

The city library of Kakul has old Turkish and Persian texts, which suggest that kachori may have come from Jhelum because the Hindu pandits of the Valley used to have a preparation made of maida, ground pulses and condiments with a dash of tamarind. Allama Iqbal’s Kashmiri Hindu ancestors used to prepare this item, a kind of precursor to kachori.

Yet, all said and done I’m still not convinced about its origin because once I had something similar to kachori in Tunisia in North Africa. It tasted like kachori and when I asked about its history, an elderly Muslim gentleman told me they’d been eating it since the 10th century. It was a pure vegetarian item, which is indeed a rarity in those parts. And it tasted better than kachori. Indian kachori can only be an apology for the Tunisian vegetarian flat pie.

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